Personal Infrastructure Crisis/Spitzer's "Boy Toy"/Ingersoll Quotes

(P1) Political

Infrastructure?

Friend Tom Mariani, primarily as the result of the family Volkswagen plunging off a bridge crumbled by an earthquake near Eureka, California in late 1980, became a strong advocate for improving the state's highway infrastructure.


Look closely at the photo, and you'll see the car bearing Tom and his wife. For a time they were terrified not to be able to find their two children who had been ejected from the car. Tom writes The L.A. quakes in the 1970s that caused overpass failures, showed that we cannot rely on the constant force of gravity. What my wife and I saw out of our windshield November 8, 1980, and what we all saw in the Bay Area after the 1989 quakes, further demonstrated that Caltrans' engineering theory for freeway construction does not hold up during an earthquake.


To this I add "infrastructure" well may be the single greatest concern and cause to which each of us should subscribe. As roads and bridges age, as water conduits corrode, as buildings rot, far too little is being done in the way of replacement. "Taxes" whether new or increased apparently have become "evil. Many of us grew up expecting to pay our fair share in return for services and infrastructure improvements. Sure we grumbled at tax time, but we knew that there was no free lunch. Somehow, over the past 30 years, the term "tax increase" is barely whispered. Instead, we have either unbridled borrowing or, perhaps worse, nothing at all. On top of that, proposition 13 gave us one percent property taxes. That "free lunch" resulted in "no lunch." Wake up, California and America; demand infrastructure projects and also the jobs they will create!!!

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(P2) Poetical



"Boy Toy"

Partial representation of 8"x8" Acrylic painting by Jim Spitzer

For Sale

jimspitzer@lycos.com

or visit the studio at
4524 Badger Rd.
Santa Rosa, CA 95404

707-538-4640

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(P3) Philosophical

4 From Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) (Look him up!!!)

1. It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.

2. A believer is a bird in a cage; a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing.

3. Who can estimate the misery that has been caused by this infamous doctrine of eternal punishment? Think of the lives it has blighted--of the tears it has caused--of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. This doctrine renders God the basest and most cruel in the universe...There is nothing more degrading than to worship such a god.

4. Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith!

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